7 News Belize

Gayle Report Includes Terrifying Testimonials From Children
posted (December 7, 2010)
Dr. Herbert Gayle's 400 page study on the patterns of violence in Belize has been out for two weeks and one of the most compelling sections is Chapter 6.

It seeks to explain aggression in primary school children based on a sampling of a cross section of children who provided information using a number of techniques including animated life histories where they drew pictures of their surroundings and family relations.

All those were put together to form a composite image of how the child interacts with crime, violence and social disorder. Many of the narratives that came out are stunning and Dr. Gayle says that we still haven't heard the half.

Jules Vasquez
"People don't recognize those 92 children in chapter 6. Those can be Belizeans and if they are Belizeans they are out rightly fantasizing and prevaricating."

Dr. Herbert Gayle, Violence Anthropologist
"And yet we reduced the data. They are a very few times in my life I have done this. We had to reduce the data - what we call data reduction; we literally had to strip away areas of the data that would be so graphic that people choke rather than read. I kid you not, I have worked with kids in countries I won't even name. I have worked with kids who have been shot, who have their shoulder blown off, I have never been more traumatized than by that chapter - listening to kids give you inch by inch details of murders being committed in their house, in their neighborhood, right under their eyes sitting down and watching. In fact the only one we couldn't avoid putting was the little boy who stayed on the bed while his father kill his mother and then kill himself. I mean that kind of stuff was just all over the data. We had some of them that were so graphic, you could literally just go for the perpetrator, that is the kind of stuff that people are experiencing."

Jules Vasquez
"But it's an alarming exposure to and intimacy with violence, that's what comes out of that chapter. It is over exposed."

Dr. Herbert Gayle, Violence Anthropologist
"I mean look at that compare to Jamaica which I did a section on. Jamaica has the second highest murder rate in the world but Jamaica has space, Belize City is a speck, there is no way you are going to have 100 murders and people don't feel it. And this is what people are not understanding, the geography of Belize City. Belmopan would never have that, Cayo cannot have those kind of problems because they are more spread out. Even the very geography of this zone is a core factor - just one little tiny delta with a mass amount of problems, just, even the very topography, even the way Belize City is laid out is problematic. It's just canals, canals and canals, just....I've seen people houses lean on the gully bank and I'm like 'come on who sits down and let something like this happen?' Some of the things that the kids say we couldn't even write it down on the first draft, because you can't write those things, it's like just out of your own sense of being a human being, you can't write that down on paper because you don't want to read it again. And I am saying if that is their experience now, how are we going to convince them later that they are human beings? It depressed me you know, chapter 6 really depressed me, and that chapter we have taken the most care because they are children - we don't want anybody to identify anybody - so we've taken the most care to strip out stuff."

Jules Vasquez
"Yet even with all these scarred and damaged children, you still feel there is hope."

Dr. Herbert Gayle, Violence Anthropologist
"There is tremendous hope in Belize. A young population, how many other countries in the world...? I took one whole evening with a group of my friends to say can we find a second country in the world with 70% of the population below age 35? No we couldn't."

The full research including that chapter 6 can be found through a link at 7newsbelize.com.
http://issuu.com/7newsbelize/docs/male_social_participation_and_violence_in_urban_be

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